“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush

Thursday, September 24, 2015

The US Mercenary Military Forces Have Been In Afghanistan 14 Years - The Families of A Citizen US Military Under A Selective Service System Would Never Have Tolerated Such an Outrage - Here Are Some of the Results

Murder, Mayhem and Rape in Afghanistan: Made in the U.S.A.

Bystanders gather in the aftermath of a bomb explosion in the central part of Kabul, Afghanistan, in July. (Rahmat Gul / AP)

“The Kite Runner,” Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel, featured a pivotal and highly controversial scene in which one of the young male protagonists is raped by an older youth. That harrowing section of the best-selling book highlighted the rampant sexual abuse of children in Afghanistan. Now, a revelation—even more horrifying—has implicated real-life U.S. soldiers serving in that country. The New York Times on Sunday reported how troops have been instructed to condone the routine rape of Afghan children by our warlord allies. The story is a cringe-inducing example of how corrupt our war in Afghanistan has been.

So rampant is the phenomenon of child rape by Afghan military commanders that it has a name: bacha bazi, which translates into “boy-play.” In some cases, rapes have taken place on U.S. military bases under the noses of American soldiers. But U.S. troops were told to look the other way because Washington considers the rapists’ help in fighting the Taliban central to its military strategy. Consequently, according to the Times, “instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of village—and doing little when they began abusing children.” The hypocrisy of arming human rights violators against the purportedly violent Taliban did not escape the notice of some U.S. troops who attempted to speak out but encountered retaliation.

When confronted with the revelations, the top brass of the U.S. military justified its apparent policy of excusing child rape among allied commanders. Spokesman Col. Brian Tribus, who is stationed in Afghanistan, told the Times, “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law,” and that U.S. troops are not obligated to even report the crimes. “An exception, he said, is when rape is being used as a weapon of war.” Strangely, the rape of Afghan children by our warlord friends is not considered a weapon of war, even though the victims are the most vulnerable members of the Afghan public that the U.S. has claimed to protect in the longest war it has ever waged.

As we approach the 14th anniversary of the start of the war, it is instructive to look back at the warnings that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan(RAWA), the leading Afghan women’s rights group, issued in the early weeks of the war. After the Taliban fled Kabul and U.S.-backed warlords called the Northern Alliance (NA) entered the capital, RAWA wrote, “The retreat of the terrorist Taliban from Kabul is a positive development, but entering of the rapist and looter NA in the city is nothing but a [sic] dreadful and shocking news for about 2 million residents of Kabul.” But RAWA’s warnings fell on deaf ears, because defeating the Taliban outweighed the brutality of our warlord allies. Over the years, RAWA and many other groups and individuals have warned against allying with the criminal warlords, but the U.S. has ignored them.

The child rape story should not surprise us. The current Afghan government, which is supposed to symbolize the democratic progress resulting from the U.S. war, has at its highest echelons an alleged mass murderer. Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum was deeply implicated in the murder of hundreds, possibly thousands, of captured Taliban soldiers in 2001. As in the case of child rape, U.S. military commanders looked the other way and refused to investigate the killings, since they occurred at the hands of a man who, for years, was on the CIA’s payroll.

Nearly a decade and a half of U.S. occupation has resulted in a country so dangerous that, according to the latest United Nations report on Afghanistan, “Civilians continued to bear the brunt of the Afghan conflict in the first half of 2015,” and “casualties are projected to equal or exceed the record high numbers documented last year.” In fact, civilian casualties spiked a whopping 60 percent in the first half of this year, compared with the same period in 2014. The U.N. explained that the rise was “mostly due to increased civilian casualties caused by pro-Government forces during ground engagements.” “Pro-government forces” is simply another phrase for U.S.-backed forces.

Under the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the drug trade has also flourished. Just as warlords have been allowed to rape children and murder captives, U.S. troops have looked the other way as their drug lord allies have cultivated and sold opium and heroin. Afghanistan is now the No. 1 global supplier of heroin. Author Julien Mercille points out in his book “Cruel Harvest: U.S. Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade,” that “US policies ... have followed a historical pattern of toleration and protection of strongmen involved in narcotics.” U.S.-backed warlords reside in so-called “Poppy Palaces,” built from the spoils of the drug trade, even as ordinary Afghans struggle to meet their most basic needs. Drug addiction has skyrocketed so much among poor Afghans that it has resulted in whole villages of addicts, ranging from ages 10 to 60.

The McClatchy publishing company reports that when Afghanistan’s minister for counternarcotics, Gen. Khodaidad, was asked what the U.S. military has done to help eradicate opium and heroin, his response was, “Nothing.”

When the story of the alleged mass murder involving Dostum came to light in 2009, The New York Times quoted former U.S. Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper: “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ” In last Sunday’s piece in the newspaper, Col. Tribus gave a similar explanation for why child rape is being ignored. The article’s author, Joseph Goldstein, went on to write that there is a “reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife, particularly among powerful men. ...”

Thanks to the U.S., warlords in Afghanistan seem to have free rein to rape, kill, and grow and sell drugs. By continually empowering these strongmen, Washington has effectively warped Afghan society. Women, children and ordinary Afghan men are paying the price of this supposed culturally sensitive reluctance to address problems like rape, murder and drugs.

It is no wonder, then, that ordinary Afghans are fleeing. About 13 percent of the refugees making their way to Europe in the past few months have been Afghan. Desperate Afghans wait in line for hours to obtain their passports and leave any way they can. They hope to elude the violence unleashed by U.S. policies in the form of rapist and murderous warlords on one side and the Taliban and Islamic State on the other.

Strengthened by the U.S., Afghanistan’s warlords are determined to retain their power. In a news report posted on RAWA’s website, journalist Sadaqat Ali points out how the fiefdoms of U.S.-backed warlords are being passed down from one generation to the next. When militia leaders die, their sons take their places, and, according to Ali, “this new generation also knows how to exploit the process of democracy to remain in power. They have inherited from their fathers how to use their militia and financial strength to rig elections.”

Despite lower levels of U.S. media coverage, the Afghanistan War continues. President Obama reneged on a promise to pull out troops, citing, among other reasons, the emergence of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. If the results of the 14-year occupation are any indication, there is no reason to believe that continued U.S. presence will in any way reduce violence. In addition to Islamic State, the Taliban are so strong that they continue to launch brazen attacks, such as that in Helmand province last month, when two U.S. Army Humvees obtained by the militant group were used in a mass shooting at a checkpoint.

One of the few bright spots to emerge within Afghan society in recent months is bold media coverage by Afghans themselves. An English-language news satire website called Afghan Onion, inspired by The Onion, has begun to relentlessly mock warlords and the Taliban. On its Twitter feed, Afghan Onion posts headlines about warlords like Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (“Just in: Sayyaf reveals it’s been two months he has not received God’s revelations. Crisis?”) and even the late Taliban leader (“Mullah Omar wins posthumous Emmys for best villain”). Similar to how RAWA operates, the site’s founders enjoy the anonymity the Internet affords, essential to avoid death at the hands of the men it shames. The Los Angeles Times, in a report about the Afghan Onion, quoted a founder of the website, who started the project in response to the last election, which he denounced as a “funny joke” and “a theater for foreign meddling.”

Still, Afghanistan is a dangerous place to be a journalist. In August, the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee reported dozens of beatings, threats and detentions of journalists inside Afghanistan. Just as in other cases, the majority of the incidents—72 percent—were attributed to “government organizations,” which are, of course, allied with the U.S.

We consider the Taliban—and now Islamic State—to be the worst threats to Afghan people. But the pattern of the mayhem and cruelty in Afghanistan is so clear, it ought to have a “Made in the U.S.A.” label on it.

You may not understand this because of your lack of experience and compassion but what war does to a society is incomprehensible to someone with your twin deficits.

Do you know in which year of combat domestic riots protesting the Viet Nam War started? We are in year 14 in Afghanistan and nada from the US public.

Why?

The US Army is a mercenary force. They are the very thing the US founders dreaded. They feared what it would do to our own society. WE know what it is doing to the poor miserable people we are killing and terrorizing.

What have we done to those people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria? I have seen some of them in Germany. I have been held up in traffic jams because of police random stops on trucks as they search of people who have lost anything because of our wars.

I look at who we are supporting in Afghanistan and Syria. WE have destabilized these countries with our wars. The innocents are paying the price.

Many of the ordinary people fleeing to the West are from Afghanistan.You obviously didn’t read the links:

...The exodus reflects worsening economic and security conditions that are setting off alarm bells from Washington to Brussels to Moscow. The uncertainty threatens to push more Afghans to seek asylum in Europe, destabilize areas near Russia’s southern border and upend American plans to end the country’s longest war.

Afghans made up about 13 percent of migrants that traveled to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea from January to August, according to the United Nations refugee agency. That’s second only to Syrians fleeing civil war.

Many of the Afghans lining up for passports spend hours in the hot sun, the first step in a journey that costs thousands of dollars and puts their lives at risk. Most are heading to Europe.

“We all have run out of patience,” Nabi Askary, 41, a former NGO worker, said in an interview as he queued up earlier this month. “We are seeking to create a good life in other countries for the betterment of us and our children.”

Since visas are extremely difficult to obtain, many pay human smugglers to organize the trips. The most common routes go through Iran and Turkey, and include a combination of travel on airplanes, buses, boats and on foot through rough terrain.

In Saudi Arabia and they stone women, pervs, all sorts of people to death with a good deal of regularity, and have been doing so for 1400 years.....are we responsible for this ?

In Iran they stone women, pervs, all sorts of people to death with a good deal of regularity, the extra judicial killings are quite high, and have been doing so for 1400 years.....are we responsible for this ?

Are we responsible for the goings on in Syria ? It is really a stretch to think so.....what about Somalia, Nigeria.....?

Is every little buggered boy in all these countries our fault ?

I don't think it is the fault of the USA that they mistreat one another......I think the fault lies within themselves....

I'll disregard your allegation of lack of compassion.........

I just don't want them in my country, and hardly anyone else does either.

The Pope certainly doesn't want them in the Vatican compound, either, the old fraud.

No even women of the west can get into the Vatican, unless they are married to a Swiss Guard....

O bullshit, it's when we leave post haste that hell comes home to roost. It's Obama's fault. After the Surge there were three or four years of calm, then we take out all the troops and hell breaks out....

And I don't recall any American troops in Syria.....place would be better off if there were some, not that I am advocating it......

Before the recent upsurge in violence in Syria and Iraq, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that Afghanistan remained the world’s top producer of refugees for the 32nd year in a row. As of July 2014, the UNHCR estimated there are approximately 700,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Afghanistan. Violence has been the major factor in involuntary population movements among Afghans.

The vast majority of Afghan refugees reside in Pakistan and Iran, where they face an uncertain political situation, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Iranian officials, for example, deport thousands of undocumented Afghans without allowing them the opportunity to demonstrate a legal right to remain in Iran, or to lodge an asylum application.

When Afghan refugees do repatriate, they return to a country that remains plagued by war, poverty, and lawlessness. According to a 2012 report by the Feinstein International Center, one in three Afghan children are malnourished, with rates far higher in conflict-affected regions. Access to health care remains very limited, with 15 percent of the population without access to even basic healthcare services. In areas where fighting continues, militants lack respect for the neutrality of health care facilities, making visiting these facilities dangerous.

The Soviet–Afghan War lasted over nine years from December 1979 to February 1989. Insurgent groups (“the Mujahideen” See Photo At THE TOP OF THIS BLOG) who received substantial aid from the United States and several Muslim countries, fought against the Soviet Army and allied Afghan forces. Between 850,000–1.5 million civilians were killed[24][25] and millions of Afghans fled the country as refugees, mostly to Pakistan and Iran.

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen prior to and during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups that were favoured by neighbouring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Marxist-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime since before the Soviet intervention[citation needed]. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken;[1] funding began with $20–$30 million per year in 1980 and rose to $630 million per year in 1987.[2] Funding continued after 1989 as the mujahideen battled the forces of Mohammad Najibullah's PDPA during the civil war in Afghanistan (1989–1992).[3]

President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was later quoted as saying that the goal of the program was to "induce a Soviet military intervention",[6][7] but later clarified that this was "a very sensationalized and abbreviated" misquotation and that the Soviet invasion occurred largely because of previous U.S. failures to restrain Soviet influence.[8][9] According to Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, Cyrus Vance's close aide Marshall Shulman "insists that the State Department worked hard to dissuade the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it, though he says he was unaware of the covert program at the time. Indeed, Vance hardly seems to be represented at all in Gates’ recounting".

What I remember most about Carter was the grain embargo, the killer low grain prices, and the interest rates of over 20%.

I didn't like the guy.

I wasn't opposed to sending some Stinger missiles to shoot down Russian helicopters....seemed like something of a pay back for them arming the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, to me.

At the time it was impossible to foresee a bunch of Saudi crazies taking up residence there and launching 9/11 against the USA......

In hindsight it might have been best to not send the Stinger missiles, and other stuff, and maybe the Russians would still be bogged down there.

That national security adviser to Carter, Big Zbig, did say it helped bring down the Soviet Union, one of the last straws that broke the camel's back so to speak......he might have been right about that......if we can agree on that, then I think we would need to conclude that actually it was worth it......as Eastern Europe is now, finally, out from under the Soviet occupation and dominance and can go about living there own national lives.....

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama will announce the news on Friday.

WASHINGTON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - China will announce Friday that it will launch a national carbon emissions trading market in 2017 as part of a joint climate change statement with the United States meant to boost prospects for a global climate pact, U.S. officials said.

The statement will be one of the few policy announcements the two countries are expected to make during Chinese President Xi Jinping's meetings with U.S. President Barack Obama Friday. The leaders will meet amid tensions over alleged Chinese cyber spying, Beijing's economic policies and China's regional territorial disputes.

The "joint presidential statement" will build on the breakthrough announcement Xi and Obama made last year where both countries pledged targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020.

On Friday they will outline new and existing domestic measures to show the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses are serious about reaching those targets and will "lead the world toward a durable global climate agreement," the U.S. official said.

For the first time, China will confirm that 2017 is its launch date for a national carbon market to help meet its goals of reducing emissions after they peak around 2030. The market will cover key sectors including power generation, iron and steel, chemicals and cement.

"These sectors together produce a substantial percentage of China's climate pollution, and this reflects a significant policy move that the Chinese are announcing they will take," the U.S. official told reporters Thursday.

It will be designed based on what was learned from the seven regional pilot exchanges that are in operation in China.

The United States and China are also expected to announce commitments to finalize regulations to control emissions from heavy trucks, and make new proposals to cooperate on building efficiency and appliance standards.

The U.S. official said China will also announce a pledge to provide aid to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change or adopt cleaner energy technology. Such funding is crucial for building support for a global climate change agreement to be reached in Paris in December from developing countries.

Chinese officials did not comment initially, but were planning to meet separately with Chinese media. (Reporting By Valerie Volcovici; Editing by David Gregorio)

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.

Four years later, the Army is also trying to forcibly retire Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a Special Forces member who joined Captain Quinn in beating up the commander.

“The Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense),” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who hopes to save Sergeant Martland’s career, wrote last week to the Pentagon’s inspector general.

In Sergeant Martland’s case, the Army said it could not comment because of the Privacy Act.

When asked about American military policy, the spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus, wrote in an email: “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law.” He added that “there would be no express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.” An exception, he said, is when rape is being used as a weapon of war.

The American policy of nonintervention is intended to maintain good relations with the Afghan police and militia units the United States has trained to fight the Taliban. It also reflects a reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife, particularly among powerful men, for whom being surrounded by young teenagers can be a mark of social status.

Some soldiers believed that the policy made sense, even if they were personally distressed at the sexual predation they witnessed or heard about.

Still, the former lance corporal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending fellow Marines, recalled feeling sickened the day he entered a room on a base and saw three or four men lying on the floor with children between them. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what was happening under the sheet, but I have a pretty good idea of what was going on,” he said.

But the American policy of treating child sexual abuse as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children are being preyed upon. The pitfalls of the policy emerged clearly as American Special Forces soldiers began to form Afghan Local Police militias to hold villages that American forces had retaken from the Taliban in 2010 and 2011.

By the summer of 2011, Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland, both Green Berets on their second tour in northern Kunduz Province, began to receive dire complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training and supporting.

First, they were told, one of the militia commanders raped a 14- or 15-year-old girl whom he had spotted working in the fields. Captain Quinn informed the provincial police chief, who soon levied punishment. “He got one day in jail, and then she was forced to marry him,” Mr. Quinn said.

When he asked a superior officer what more he could do, he was told that he had done well to bring it up with local officials but that there was nothing else to be done. “We’re being praised for doing the right thing, and a guy just got away with raping a 14-year-old girl,” Mr. Quinn said.

Village elders grew more upset at the predatory behavior of American-backed commanders. After each case, Captain Quinn would gather the Afghan commanders and lecture them on human rights.

Soon another commander absconded with his men’s wages. Mr. Quinn said he later heard that the commander had spent the money on dancing boys. Another commander murdered his 12-year-old daughter in a so-called honor killing for having kissed a boy. “There were no repercussions,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.

She explained that because “her son was such a good-looking kid, he was a status symbol” coveted by local commanders, recalled Mr. Quinn, who did not speak to the woman directly but was told about her visit when he returned to the base from a mission later that day.

So Captain Quinn summoned Abdul Rahman and confronted him about what he had done. The police commander acknowledged that it was true, but brushed it off. When the American officer began to lecture about “how you are held to a higher standard if you are working with U.S. forces, and people expect more of you,” the commander began to laugh.

The UN has issued an urgent call for Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a young man who faces imminent beheading and crucifixion for crimes he reportedly committed as a child.

A Saudi court has upheld the sentence of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, the son of a prominent government dissident, despite growing and high-level international condemnation.

Mr al-Nimr, who was arrested in 2012 for his participation in Arab Spring protests when he was just 16 or 17 years old, could now be put to death at any time.

The young man’s case has been the subject of fervent campaigning from rights groups including Amnesty International and Reprieve, who say he was tortured and forced to sign a false confession before being sentenced to “death by crucifixion”.

Zeze Rwasama, the director of College of Southern (CSI) Idaho’s refugee relocation center, has to shake his head at the firestorm that has erupted over his program in the farming town of Twin Falls, Idaho.

“These people, they are working from false information,” he says ruefully. “All we can do is tell people the facts and hope they listen.”

For more than 30 years, CSI has hosted a refugee relocation center tucked away on its Twin Falls campus, lending a hand to people from around the world uprooted by political violence and other upheavals. And for most of those years, it has gone about its work quietly, placing the refugees in jobs and living arrangements and helping them get educations and, often, become American citizens, with little controversy.

So it came as something of a shock to the people running the center this summer when a group of far-right local citizens – fueled by paranoid fears of the looming imposition of “Sharia law” and the spread of ISIS-affiliated terrorism – began organizing against its operations, demanding that the college divest itself of the program and petitioning the governor of Idaho to cease all refugee-relocation programs in the state.

The group, organized as the Committee to End the CSI Refugee Center, began showing up at CSI board meetings in June to demand the center be closed, spurred by the announcement in April that refugees from Syria would soon be among those being processed by the center.

"Bringing in Syrians, who are predominantly of Muslim background, may be opening the door to terrorists pretending to be refugees," said Rick Martin, a conservative political activist from the nearby town of Buhl, who heads up the committee.

"We're not against legitimate refugees. They need to be treated with dignity and respect. But it would be easy for someone to lie about their background," he added.

The group tried in August to put a measure on the Twin Falls County spring ballot to have the center banned from the CSI campus, but the county attorney declined to allow it, saying it was blatantly unconstitutional. The group last week filed a second petition, claiming its new language resolved the problems, but the county attorney again indicated that it would have problems clearing the legal hurdles.

The committee has remained undaunted, opening an online petition pleading with the CSI board to shut down the program. The petition claims that elsewhere, “refugee resettlement has resulted in a pattern of horrific sex crimes,” and that in Boise, it “has resulted in an increase in terrorist activity,” while “every dollar spent assimilating a single extended family of refugees is a dollar that could be spent making their home country more livable for all their countrymen.”

Another petition, directed at Gov. Butch Otter, garnered over 200 signatures at Change.org, urging that all refugee programs in the state be shut down: “If this reverse colonization of our country continues, there won't be a future for American Families,” it stated.

Petition signers made clear their thinking: “To hell with the humanitarian effort. We are at war with these people,” said one. “These refugees are a threat to my family, my way of life, and my country,” wrote another.

Idaho Bob, your few posts above show why I ask that you not attach your comments to my posts. I see you have once again started to do it and once again I ask that you don’t.

You are just too damn stupid to hold a conversation with.

Deuce’s comments on the draft are right on. His comments on you, say it all.

All I would add is that it amazing how many inanities you can package in few short posts. Everything you have put up is wrong.

After the Surge there were three or four years of calm…

Damn, you are stupid. Bush signed the SOFA in 2008 with a date certain for the withdrawal of US troops. It called for ALL US troops to be pulled out of the cities by the middle of 2009. It called for ALL the US troops to be pulled out Iraq by the end of 2011. In the 3 years after Bush signed the SOFA, 1000 more US troops died in the combat there. Not that you would give a shit.

As for ‘calm’, you might call it such. US troops, under the so-called surge, forced a mass relocation in Baghdad, separating the various sectarian and religious groups into their own walled in ghettos, Shia, Sunni, Christian, etc. That action created even more thousands of internally displaced refugees. You call it calm. The refugees call it hell.

… then we take out all the troops and hell breaks out....

What a vacuous dolt. The seeds for what is happening now in Iraq were planted long before 2011. First, it was Bush’s war that created the 2 million external refugees that flooded into neighboring countries, three quarters of them into Syria. Among those were remnants of the Iraqi army Bush kicked to the curb. Many of the Baathists amongst them are now leaders of ISIS. It was Bush’s prisons that radicalized many of the other leaders of ISIS including Baghdadi.

Bush’s actions, including the ‘surge,’ also resulted in an additional 2 – 3 million internal Iraqi refugees.

Also, Bush’s CIA vetted all the candidates for the Iraqi elections. Al Maliki was their boy. They figured he would not be swayed by Iran and because of his lack of experience he could be easily manipulated. They were wrong on both counts. It was his ruthless crack down on his political enemies and his corrupt and sectarian rule that led to many of the problems in the current war.

The ‘surge’ meme and blaming Obama is an effort by the neocons and their useful idiots to save face after the complete clusterfuck that they created in Bush’s Iraq war.

Only a fool would think it was anything but.

Deuce pretty much covered Afghanistan, a war were Obama shares much of the blame. However, it amazes me that after 14 years of failure there are still idiots that would argue that we should still stay there and get more Americans killed.

North Korea would be a hell of a lot more pleasant place if there were American troops there, like in South Korea.

I tell you what. Why don't you talk you daughter into signing up. How about that so-called 'niece' of yours.

It funny how it is always fat assed old men like you that are so eager and willing to send young guys to war...oh, sorry, I should have said 'troops', a euphemism that allows you pricks to forget that it is young lives we are talking about.

If the Japanese had done as the Germans wanted and attacked into Siberia instead of Hawaii WWII would have turned out much differently.

Are you nutz? What has that got to do with Iraq or Afghanistan (or Libya for that matter), countries where our intervention has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of internal and external refugees?

Get off the booze. Try making some kind of sense. Better yet, go away.

The Pope certainly doesn't want them in the Vatican compound, either, the old fraud.

No even women of the west can get into the Vatican, unless they are married to a Swiss Guard....Idaho BobThu Sep 24, 07:37:00 PM EDT

More bullshit.

The pope has said the Vatican would be taking in one of the refugee families. He also suggested that each Catholic parish think about doing the same.

Now, realizing that you are an ignorant yokel, let me explain something to you. There are only between 800 and 900 hundred citizens in the Vatican. The vast majority of them are clerics but there are a few females (30-40) most of which are relatives of workers there including the Guards. But a few years ago (possibly now) there were also a couple that had citizenship because of their employment there. All of them, men and women alike give up their Vatican citizenship when they leave the Vatican.

What's good enough for the Pope is good enough for me !

I'm glad to here it. Vatican City, all of it is contained within about 100 acres of land. Since you likely have at least that much land, why don't you write to il Papa and tell him you awaiting your refugee family?

I don't want them. They are not my problem. I wanted to put up safe zones, no fly areas, stop the fighting, but you asshole called me a warmonger.

I suggest they are your problem now......you put them in your backyard.

Remember, the first generation will make some small effort to assimilate......the next and next, no......it will end up like in Europe....no go zones, raping Swedish women for sport and fun....car-b-ques all summer long....bombings.....you take them in big fellow, show us your compassion.....and you stupidity.

You don't speak up as emphatically as you could for the unique benefit of Judeo-Christian, Western Civilization.

You don't speak up as emphatically as you could for the Christians and other minorities suffering from a cultural and biological genocide in the Muslim world right now, not to mention the obscene atrocities committed against these folk, atrocities I will not, out of delicacy's sake, spell out to you, but of which you should be aware.

You then go on to insist, to a captive audience, the US Congress, that American and European capitalists, beneficiaries of the fruits of Western, Judeo-Christian Civilization, tear down their borders and take in uncounted migrants -- you instruct us to ignore the numbers -- whose entry will, of course, irrevocably alter the civilization they enter -- by their own demand. Thus changing the fruitful lands they enter into carbon copies of the lands from which they have run.

How, Holy Father, is this ethical? It sounds very sweet, in your obviously elderly, very gentle, very accented voice. But how is it ethical?

Is it not more ethical to champion the system that produced the fruitful civilization you obviously admire -- not to say envy? And to insist that the migrants themselves look at the lands they are rushing to escape at any cost, look at the reasons why those lands are so unattractive, and work to improve those lands?

Holy Father, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that every last person in Syria and Afghanistan would leave Syria and Afghanistan if they could.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to ask why that might be.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to ask, "Why can't the residents of Syria and Afghanistan address what is so immensely and grotesquely f---ed up (forgive me but that really is the only word) about their homelands that every last person in Syria and Afghanistan wants to leave Syria and Afghanistan and runs, trips, hitchhikes, swims, boats, and crawls through numerous Muslim countries en route in order to get to Western Europe.

The 1,400-year-long cycle of Islamic violence is fed not by injustice or fresh new assaults on sovereignty. Rather, it pre-exists the rise of Western capitalism by several centuries, and it constitutes the heart of the Muslim world. The cycle is fueled by Muslims' fundamental organizing principle: Islam.

There is no place on Earth where a significant population of Muslims are present that does not also live with regular Islamic-inspired violence and disruption. This applies to both Muslim enclaves in Western democracies and Muslim-dominated nations around the world. Where Islam is, violence and civil tension follow.

Are all Muslims like this? No, they aren't. Just as all Catholics don't abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent, there is a continuum of adherence to religious principles found in Islam. However, every religion has its universally accepted core elements – shared tenets that are foundational to the faith.

It is the "supremacist" core element of Islam (note: this is an aspect of Islam, not a perversion or interpretation) that ensures the reliability of the cycle. The battle is the aim – the jihad that cannot rest until the Earth has submitted entirely to Islam.

What does this mean for the United States? The Obama administration is pledging to accept tens of thousands of "refugees" from Syria and Iraq. Recent reports indicate that this number may rise exponentially in coming months.

The United States has already accepted hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants from around the world, and to date, their assimilation into American society is proceeding at a snail's pace, if at all.

Warnings have been issued by European governments that terrorists (elements of ISIS and al-Qaeda) have inserted themselves into the stream of Muslim migrants currently invading Europe.

This warning, while important, misses the larger issue entirely: that the importation (en masse) of Muslims brings with it an ideology bent on the destruction of the host nation. Islam arrives not to "blend in." It arrives to take over.

By some estimates, the composition of the "refugee" arrivals is upwards of 70% males of military age. War refugees flee their countries with wives and children, while migrants traveling for economic opportunity or other reasons typically send a father or son ahead to prepare the way for the rest of the family to follow.

There are certainly some war refugees amid the masses currently flooding Europe, but they are just as certainly a minority of the whole, and the likelihood that these Muslim men, coming from Muslim-dominated nations, intend to culturally assimilate into the societies of Europe is statistically nil.

Over the coming months, America will be asked (then told!) to accept "our share" of "refugees." Incomprehensibly, these "refugees" will be almost entirely Muslim, despite the fact that it is the Christian and other non-Muslim residents of the region who are truly in danger, with tens of thousands already slaughtered and enslaved as a part of the current pogrom of subjugation under the heel of Islam.

It has been said that just because a group of Sunni Muslims is fleeing extermination from a group of Shia Muslims – or vice versa – that doesn't mean that either is innocent in the conflict. Should the pursued become more numerous than the pursuers, they will immediately turn and put their former tormenters to the sword. Each flees from each other, but neither is really a "refugee."

It is important to ask, if this is indeed a refugee crisis with hundreds of thousands fleeing their war-torn homelands, why now? The Syrian civil war has been going on for years. ISIS has been operating for nearly as long. It seems reasonable to conclude that the genesis of this migration lies elsewhere.

If you are a well-informed reader, then you have heard the term "civilizational jihad," the process by which Muslims seek to overwhelm host nations through immigration and the exploitation of Western values of religious tolerance and liberty.

The present surge of Muslims into Europe is not a spontaneous response to deteriorating conditions in the Middle East. Instead, it is a carefully orchestrated migration to swell the populations of existing Muslim enclaves in Europe to the breaking point.

The subsequent social disruptions will have native Europeans calling for action to bring the migration to a halt by any means necessary. In the mind of the Muslim Brotherhood (at whose behest this "migration" began), it is a win-win.

Ideally, the Europeans will grow so uncomfortable with the influx of Islamists that they'll support increased action to remove Assad, thereby restarting the "Arab Spring" and handing the Brotherhood an essential jewel for their planned caliphate crown.

At the very least, the cause of civilizational jihad will be advanced more in a matter of months than it would have progressed in decades of orderly immigration and high birth rates.

Either scenario is catastrophic for the West and is functionally equivalent to giving Typhoid Mary an unlimited EuroRail pass.

We screen new arrivals at the border for diseases because we don't want to permit the importation of infections to which we have little or no natural immunity. In the case of Islam, we are indeed importing the infection itself, subsequently refusing to quarantine the carriers from the native population out of a misguided sense of tolerance.

Germany has committed to accepting millions of Islamic "refugees" over the next ten years – 800,000 this year alone, followed by half a million more each year thereafter – in the hopes that the infusion of new laborers can offset the ridiculously anemic birth rate of native Germans. Combine migration at such extreme levels with a government so enamored of multiculturalism that they will prosecute their own citizens for speaking against the policy, and you have the stuff of an invasion.

Under what circumstances has any nation permitted an influx of a different culture at such extreme levels and remained sovereign? I'll give you a hint…it hasn't ever happened. Ever.

Unless Germany reverses course, it will become a Muslim nation within 15 years, and native Germans will live under the rule of their new Muslim overlords, dhimmis in their own land.

Remember, someone asking for political asylum is not guaranteed to be deserving. Each of the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was an asylum seeker when they arrived on our shores. How'd that work out?

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.